Kindle to Save Newspapers?

As newspapers struggle to stay afloat with an old distribution medium in a down economy, they are hoping that digital delivery will be their saving grace. Jeff Zucker of NBC recently claimed that he’s not willing to trade analog dollars for digital cents, but when the analog dollars are going away, cents will do just fine. Amazon’s Kindle (now Kindle 2) is one way the New York Times is hoping to retain subscribership. (They have plenty of people on nytimes.com — but nobody pays for the content — whereas people pay for a digital subscription to the Times via the Kindle.)

Well just the other day, Amazon announced that they’re releasing a larger Kindle called the Kindle DX. It will have a fairly larger screen and a much larger price tag ($490 vs. $360). It’s other main feature is that it will offer viewing of PDF files, which the Kindle 2 does not. This will a couple of implications, one of which is another possible vehicle for piracy of the printed word. Why should 20 college students each buy the same $75 book when one of them can buy it and PDF it? The other implication is similar, but in a good way. It offers another means of consumers reading your sales sheets, brochures, user manuals, white papers, marketing materials, etc. on the go. The takeaway here is to make sure that you or your company is prepping all of your printed materials as PDF files with this new delivery system.